Pimp My Cause Marketers Help Social Entrepreneurs to Shine

Guest post by Rachelle Gaskell

UnLtd held the Shine Unconference last week to showcase the work of social entrepreneurs and to promote their need for greater support, as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Unltd supports social entrepreneurs through funding and development assitance, and asked Pimp My Cause to pull together a marketing clinic to support a number of social entrepreneurs preparing to pitch to a "Dragon's Den" panel for the opportunity to secure up to £5,000 of funding to turn their ideas into reality.

Marco Scarola and I answered the call to action and delivered the clinic to a number of inspiring world-changers:

Timothy Knight created the 5ways website to showcase the creative talents of everyday people and help them gain experience and recognition for their creative projects.

In 2009 Seye Odukogbe started Stay Focused - a social enterprise aimed at developing aspirations of young people as early as possible and translating those into decisions about specific career pathways. Sarah Wallbank has joined Seye in running Stay Focused and together they plan to tackle the barriers that are in the way of a significant portion or the young community in West London by providing an intensive skill development and professional awareness programme for all young people aged 13-24.

Richard Eason, the founder of Life Thrives CIC, proposes to create the Life Thrives Programme app - linking a person's 'profile' to daily activities that could enrich their lives and make them thrive. This would be achieved through personal development opportunities, a time manager, volunteering opportunities, etc.

Marco and I were on hand to support the entrepreneurs with marketing advice ahead of their presentations to the Dragons Den. Marco has a breadth of communications, marketing strategy, digital and direct marketing, information design and public relations expertise and I have a professional background in marketing and sales force effectiveness alongside 10 years spent as a volunteer, several as a board member in the UK and a recent appointment to the International Board as an International Ambassador for Variety the Children’s Charity.

Listening to their concepts, we provided guidance on how to present, how to prioritise concepts, offered advice on determining target audiences and how to approach companies regarding funding and sponsorship.

 

For the 5ways webiste looking to showcase creative talents via numerous methods for those with little work experience, success to date included ten individuals’ having had their work published. In order to fund the ongoing venture the challenge presented was one of attracting advertising revenue to develop the venture and gain donations from companies for prize competitions. Advice offered included defining the overall concept and prioritising the methods and target audience for showcasing various talents, enabling the entrepreneur to define the approach for attracting the most relevant advertisers and to the how to approach companies to gain sponsorship and support for the venture.

For Stay Focused the challenge was to gain funding to build the mentoring element of the programme so that the kids had access to visiting professional working environments and also gained the benefit of guidance and experience of professionals. Advice included how to present the concept, how to approach organisations with a wider remit of not only providing mentors to support the children and access to the organisation for work experience visits but to also gain funding from the corporate supporters to cover the costs of running the mentoring programme.

The final concept was for Life Thrives smart phone application to enable individuals to monitor how well they are 'thriving' based on a range of criteria such as their relationships with people, their mental and physical health, giving back to the community thus impacting on claims on insurers in the long term. The challenges included, defining segments within the market that the application would be relevant to, generating partnerships with companies within the wellbeing and insurance sector to promote and drive the utilisation of the application. Advice offered included defining the target market of the end consumer, creating a user friendly application that was fun to use and ideas were given on how to overcome any user dishonesty in terms of the input of information!

Working with the entrepreneurs highlighted that there were numerous great ideas and untapped concepts out there for social enterprise. The general themes of the advice offered to all the entrepreneurs was to set a clear objective, create a set of unique selling points defining a target audience both in terms of who you want to engage with and who if different is going to fund the cause. Where there were multiple goals prioritise them to align appropriate strategy, timelines and resource.

Fair to say that each entrepreneur had a lot of ideas, drive, energy, passion and willingness to act and make a difference, from my own experience it is a great feeling to be able to support others to make a difference and I would encourage anyone with an idea on how they could improve the lives of others to go for it, it is definitely worth the effort!